Page:Cellular pathology as based upon physiological and pathological histology.djvu/58

52 LECTURE II. which have in part come down to us from the last century, have exercised such a preponderating influence upon that part of histology which is, in a pathological point of view, the most important, that not even yet has unanimity been arrived at, and you will therefore be constrained, after you have inspected the preparations I shall lay before you, to come to your own conclusions as to how far that which I have to communicate to you is founded upon real observation.

If you read the 'Elementa Physiologic' of Haller, you will find, where the elements of the body are treated of, the most prominent position in the whole work assigned to fibres, the very characteristic expression being there made use of, that the fibre (fibra) is to the physiologist what the line is to the geometrician.

This conception was soon still further expanded, and the doctrine that fibres serve as the groundwork of nearly all the parts of the body, and that the most various tissues are reducible to fibres as their ultimate constituents, was longest maintained in the case of the very tissue in which, as it has turned out, the pathological difficulties were the greatest—in the so-called cellular tissue.

In the course of the last ten years of the last century there arose, however, a certain degree of reaction against this fibre-theory, and in the school of natural philosophers another element soon attained to honour, though it had its origin in far more speculative views than the former, namely, the globule. Whilst some still clung to their fibres, others, as in more recent times Milne Edwards, thought fit to go so far as to suppose the fibres, in their turn, to be made up of globules ranged in lines, This view was in part attributable to optical illusions in microscopical observation. The objectionable method which prevailed during the whole of the last and a part of the present century—of making obser-